AIBU to think non vaccination is child abuse

[alittlevoice]

There was this discussion in another thread and i thought i would make a new thread so it doesn't over taken someone elses

To me not vaccinating your child is akin to child abuse because you are putting them at undue risk of disease which is preventable due to scare mongering or from quack doctors that have long been struck off the medical register and shunned from the medical community

I hate the assumption that because there has been no reported cases it means you shouldn't vaccinate your children it's because children have been vaccinated regularly that there has not been a epidemic

leading doctors (not the quacks) have been worried for some time about the rise of mumps because of the scare mongering and children not getting vaccinated and get seriously Ill and have to be saved by modern medicine (which quack parents are always keen to take up on with there anti vaccination stance)

rubella has a incubation period as many other diseases so if your child has it and you dont know and child is near a pregnant woman and she loses her child due to non immunisation I don't understand how as a parent you'd do that to another person

So the long and short of it is why are some parents touched in the head and think they have the right for there child to possibly kill unborn children and infect younger babies too young to have the choice (and for those saying this is far fetched its as plausible of something going wrong from immunisations)

No, vaccines are medication and need to be safer than the alternative, as does any prophylactic or preventative medication. That's why they don't need to be nor can they be 100% safe.

'"I have also read quite a few serious case reviews though and not vaccinating is up there as an indicator of neglect along with parental substance abuse. Why is that?"

'

I've attended several in a Past Life and know full well my family are not abusive.

And I know altinkum's background well enough on MN to respect her take also.

"it should be a requirement that they be 100000% safe"

good luck with that one.

LeonieDelt - do you mean that more children need to be harmed by preventable diseases? Because that is what would happen without vaccines. But you are right in that there would be no vaccine damage - so that's OK

Stata: vaccinations are not given in REACTION to a disease, they are given as PROPHYLAXIS to stop one catching a disease.

I'm not arguing for the sake of arguing. Your argument isn't logical. You've painted yourself into a corner. I'm just happy for you to carry on exposing how illogical and irrational your argument is.

I just popped in to say to you all, I applaud your stamina!

The only fact that tetanus and rabies are give after is exposure since they are spread in a different way to other communicable diseases. Why you should put them in a separate category to other vaccines is beyond me. If your daughter was bitten by a dog in a rabies-endemic area would you vaccinate? The vaccine is not 100% safe after all and your daughter is still healthy (and you don't KNOW for sure if she was even exposed to the virus). I asked this question earlier but I noticed that you ignored it.

Slight OCD tendencies on my part gorgeous

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE MMR your children!

We have a HUGE amount of traveller families who come into A+E who have not had MMR who have really bad cases of measles/mumps. I'm talking so bad there have been DEATHS. I'm not saying it only goes on within travelling communities but it's HIGHLY infectious and can travel around schools, play areas, parks, etc.

actually smallwhitecat when you have people like Leonie insisting that vaccines need to be 100% safe then this is a reality check that measles and mumps can and do kill or lead to permanent disability. I think ednurses's post was highly appropriate in this context.

You are doing really well Statalover, I usually get fed up by the irrational arguments, belief in woo and conspiracy theories of the anti vax types and hide the thread after one or two posts. Otherwise I become rather depressed that people believe such things and my head hurts after I bang it against the wall several times,

Keep it up!!!!

agree with smallwhitecat about healthcare professionals being patronising, In General.

No offence, but it's really hard not to be patronising when you have people spouting drivel about vaccines needing to be 100% safe because you give them to healthy people.

If your arguments were evidence based and logical then you'd find the HCPs far less patronising.

It's called generalisation altinkum. Doesn't detract from the message that measles can kill. So your unvaccinated child may have slightly lower case fatality because you get them to the hospital earlier. Yet all this can be avoided by vaccinating. That's the message and I support it.

I think you'll find a lot of people who choose not to vaccinate were once pro vaccination. I was. Right up until the day my son regressed.

Then I did fhe reading I should have done earlier (peer reviewed papers btw) and the decisions we made for out subsequent children were different - and discussed with our gp and HV who understood our reasons for them. One of the kids has since had a seizure and so it's been discussed with a paediatrician too who also understood our reasoning.

So I couldn't really care less what someone on the Internet who has read less original research than me thinks. Probably the type of person who wouldn't go near ds1 anyway.

There are a couple of vaccinations I might consider but I am not giving a 5 in 1. And whilst we could scrape together the money for a single we can't get to London and back in a day and we can't take ds1 (that little problem of a severe regression again). I did have a long chat with a new local, private gp but in the end he decided that for now he wouldn't offer singles as he didn't want to end up at the gmc.

Most of the people I know who haven't vaccinated are in the same position as me -I.e. They were pro vaccination once upon a time. In many cases they would like to have the option to vaccinate but their fears are not addressed or answered and options such as vaccinating singly are removed. I would never give a child prone to seizures a pertussis containing vaccination - it used to be contra indicated by the manufacturers - but there is no option to give a P free jab now, so no way of getting diphtheria or tetanus protection unless you risk P. I won't. The p vaccination isn't necessarily all that effective anyway as p has mutated - and one criterion I have for giving a vaccination (I.e. taking the risk) is that it is known to be effective.

sorry i meant generalization for a reason.

There's nothing ethical about it. Not vaccinating carries risk. You have to chose a path, nothing is risk free. Yes, measles kills and is far more risky than the MMR. To demand the vaccine is 100% safe is to ignore the risks of not vaccinating. We use prophylactic medicine all the time, vaccines aren't special, and to demand that they are risk free is ridiculous. And then to say, well rabies and tetanus are different when they're not is even more ridiculous.

If ethics are involved, it's unethical, IMO, to take the riskier path.

"I dont think ednurses comment was appropriate to this thread, Ive seen cases like ednurses, and the fact that they have passed away, in not because of the illness but because of the travelling community not being able to get to a local hospital on time, not have the intellect to know that hospital admission is urgently needed."

Maybe so but also is the case with menningitis. Symptoms come on far too quickly, people go down quickly, by the time they reach hospital they are fighting for life or dead.

I did not read the rest of the replies because it is 28 pages. I think it's unfair to call HCP 'patronizing'. You wouldn't be saying that if we were looking after your DC in hospital, but of course this is MN...where everyone comes for medical advice rather than doing the done thing and seeing their GP.